rats...

Once I wanted to prove the world was sick. Now I want to prove it healthy. The detection of sickness means that death has established itself as an element of the timetable; it has come within the range of the measurable. Where there is no time there is no sickness.
 

Roy Fisher, from 'City' in The Dow Low Drop (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996), p. 27.

 

*   *   *

I've complained about it here and umpteen times before - and will continue to do so, for nothing upsets me most, nothing curtails my relationship with others and damages my health and cuts my life short as much as this absolutely pathological lack of time.

No matter how many years I go on living in this country, I shall never get used to what passes for life here, this senseless rushing from non-place to non-place, from non-conversation to non-conversation, from interruption to interruption. This sheer impossibility of finding some livable space-time inside other people's existence, because they're always dashing off elsewhere when you finally arrive, exhausted...

An unwitting flirtation with death whose price you only realise too late, when you've already paid for it because life has gone by - and won't come back. And, most heartbreaking of all, the laying waste of the only thing that gives meaning to life and makes it worth living, and whose name I won't say because it's way too precious. Way too rare. 

Rats! The song goes on outside, from a neighbour's half-opened window:

...'Cause every kiss that we don't give
Another life that we don't live
And mama it's so much sweeter when we do...

To the point.